1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a production control method, and specifically relates to a production control method for managing development of a product (production information) developed at two or more development sites, when developing software and the like.
The present invention also relates to a computer program that enables a computer to perform processing of the production control method.
2. Description of the Related Art
When developing large-scale software, a project manager at a central development site usually segments the software into sections, and distributes the sections of the software to a plurality of developers who are situated externally, and manages the whole of the production information that is a plurality of programs developed by the plurality of developers. Often, a large number of development sites are involved, with a large number of layers of the development.
Further, software development at the central development site is influenced by progress situations of the external development sites. Further, when software for program generation differs from site to site, adjustments of production information (software products) from each site are required in order to achieve consistency of the production information (software products) developed at the development sites, such that a consistent package is completed. For this reason, it has been difficult to manage the development of production information in a consistent manner. In order to solve such a problem, conventionally, there has been a technique of transmitting source information and module information extracted for purposes of managing the progress of software production at the development sites to a project manager, such as revealed in Japanese Patent 2001-92650.
However, in the above-mentioned conventional technology, managers of the external development sites have had to extract the source information and the module information from programs under development, and transmit them to the central manager, causing a problem of taking additional time and effort.
Further, since the manager at the central development site manages development progress only by the source information and the module information, without acquiring the programs developed by the external development sites, the exact development progress situation cannot be ascertained. Further, since a developer at the central site cannot acquire the program developed at the external development sites, the problem is that a program development cannot be started, or even prepared, at the central site.
Since the central development site does not acquire the program, the central site cannot take positive action when an error occurs in the program.